Young lawmakers helping drive agenda in Albany

ALBANY — The number of young people serving in the state Legislature has been skyrocketing, and they are having a significant impact on how the state handles everything from sexual harassment to economic development deals like the one offered to Amazon.

“New voices and new blood will mean that our issues will be incorporated into the agenda,” said Assemblywoman Nily Rozic (D-Queens), who was elected in 2012 at the age of 26.

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At the start of the 2009 session,10 lawmakers were younger than 35. Now there are 28, a near tripling over the course of a decade.

More than one out of every eight members is now younger than 35, 48 are younger than 40, and the 83 who are younger than 50 constitute nearly 40 percent of the 213-seat Legislature.

Outside of a 2015 analysis by the National Conference of State Legislators and the Pew Charitable Trusts, nobody appears to have studied the ages of lawmakers in New York, making historical comparisons difficult. Still, several legislators say the number of young colleagues is unprecedented in recent history.

And these new members have quickly bonded together.

“There’s camaraderie among the younger members,” said Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou (D-Manhattan), who was elected at the age of 33 in 2016 in the Lower East Side district once represented by septuagenarian Sheldon Silver.

“We’ve really developed this tremendous rapport among one another,” said Sen. James Skoufis (D-Orange County), who won an Assembly seat in 2012 at the age of 25 and succeeded the 90-year-old Bill Larkin in the Senate last month. “We’re developing friendships early on among the younger members in the Senate majority, and it’s helped to build a cohesion that has moved, I would argue, the Senate in a really positive direction.”

The surge comes at a time when a similarly youthful crop of new members in Congress, including New York’s Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez, is soaking up an outsized share of the public’s attention. But unlike in Washington, Albany’s youngest members are poised to have an immediate and major impact on policy. The major topics facing lawmakers in coming months include items like criminal justice reform and marijuana legalization in which there are clear generational divides.

And indeed, just six weeks into this year’s session, these young members already have made their presence felt. Consider the recent passage of the Child Victims Act, which extended the statute of limitations for cases involving abuse against minors.

During floor debates, three members recounted their own harrowing stories of suffering abuse, making it impossible for their colleagues to distance themselves from the issue. They ranged in age from 33 to 36, part of a generation more willing to speak out about such issues than predecessors might have been.

The influence of young members also played a role in the collapse of the Amazon deal. The company mentioned the opposition of “state and local politicians” when it pulled out of Queens — many of those officials are still in their 20s or 30s. Even the oldest politicians who emerged as prominent opponents of the deal, such as Sen. Mike Gianaris (D-Queens) and New York City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, are still members of Generation X.

And the debate over the wisdom of the incentives offered to Amazon displayed a clear generational divide. Supporters like Gov. Andrew Cuomo often seemed genuinely befuddled that anybody would view the creation of jobs as anything other than sacrosanct. The critics, most of whom came of age when issues like the cost of living, gentrification and crumbling infrastructure systems were taking center stage, spoke a fundamentally different language.

But perhaps the one issue where the age gap manifested itself most acutely was in last week’s hearing on sexual harassment, the first time lawmakers discussed the topic in a formal public fashion in 27 years.

The average age of the legislators who attended at least a few minutes of the hearing was 48, while the average age of those who skipped out was 56. By the time the hearing entered its eighth hour and television cameras had departed, nine of the 48 legislators younger than 40 were still in the room; only five of the 165 who are older than that were still present.

“This issue is looked at very differently depending on what generation you come from,” Skoufis said.

That was partially apparent in the way the topic was discussed: Terms like “gender non-binary” and “intersectionality” that were alien to the halls of the Capitol just a few years ago were thrown around with regularity.

But it was also visible in the direction the hearing took, as was made clear during the testimony of the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, which investigates sexual harassment complaints made against public officials. JCOPE has long been the punching bag of editorial writers and countless politicians touting themselves as reformers. But legislators rarely, if ever, directly challenge an entity that has the power to investigate elected officials.

That ended on Wednesday when legislators, most prominently 32-year-old Sen. Alessandra Biaggi (D-Westchester), raked the commission over the coals for 102 minutes. More than 90 percent of that time was occupied by interactions between JCOPE and the Legislature’s millennials.

When JCOPE officials acknowledged that it sometimes asks harassment victims about their sexual histories, 33-year-old Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D-Brooklyn) snapped, “That is victim-shaming. That is accepting victim shaming and putting the burden on the complainant.”

“As we’re moving forward into this new territory that we’re trying to create and this new culture that we’re trying to create, I believe that we’re creating mindful spaces,” said Biaggi at the end of JCOPE’s testimony. “That is not the same politics as usual way of doing things. I think the world is sick of seeing politics as usual. I think they’re fed up with it. I think the elections have proved that, and I think we owe it to everybody in this state to do better.

The fact that the hearing occurred in the first place might be due in large part to the changed composition of the Legislature.

“We’ve been seeing a new wave of young women, especially women of color, and I think that is a new perspective that has been lost at the table for a very long time,” said Niou.

Indeed, there were 18 female legislators younger than 40 at the beginning of this year’s session. A decade ago, there were three.

“The average age of a woman running for office [used to be] her 50s, after she had her kids,” said Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan (D-Queens), who was the youngest woman elected to the Legislature since 1920 when she won her first term in 1984 at the age of 26.

There were only two other young women serving with her at the time, she said. “I actually feel a little jealous [of the new generation], because I was really kind of alone for so long,” she said. “Nice to see history moving on.”

That being said, the increase has happened among several demographic groups and legislative conferences. Among the Assembly Republicans, for example, the number of members younger than 35 has ticked up from four to seven over the past decade.

Both parties “want to nominate younger candidates,” said Assemblyman Doug Smith (R-Suffolk), who was elected last April at the age of 27.

“You have a desire on the part of the public to put in fresh perspectives, something new. We want a new voice. And if you look at the election in 2008 for Barack Obama, even the election of Donald Trump, the public is yearning for something different. They don’t want political establishment.”

The generational change in the Legislature comes at a time when numerous other demographic shifts have occurred in the broader sphere of New York’s politics. Only 83 of the 213 legislators, or 39 percent, are now straight white males older than 40, and while the state had never had a female attorney general as of eight months ago, it’s now had two. Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins became the first female leader of a legislative majority last month, and for the first time, both chambers are concurrently led by African-Americans.

This increased diversity could have a snowball effect.

“I used to live in El Paso, Texas, and the Texas governor at the time was Ann Richards," Niou said. "And I was like, ‘she’s the governor, and that means women can be in politics.’ And I think that over time, the more that you see more women running, more women will be willing to run."

“A lot of times, women are the ones who say things like, ‘well, maybe I’m not good enough, or I need more experience, or is this my time?' You’ll never see a young man asking that, they’ll be like, ‘it’s my turn; I think I’ll be great at this.'"

Regardless of what happens down the road, it’s safe to assume the young members will have a significant impact in the coming months. The biggest issue legislators will need to deal with after the completion of this year’s budget is the looming expiration of rent control. That’s a topic where the battle lines between affordability and a moderate economic philosophy in which Democrats are willing to partner with big business are fundamentally the same as in the Amazon debate.

Historically, moderates usually win fights over rent regulations. But many of the newest legislators took hard lines in support of an overhaul during their campaigns last year. And the victories of several of those candidates in races against more moderate incumbents just might serve as a warning shot that makes other legislators a little less open to compromise than they have been in the past.

“Our new members, and there are many of them, provide a much-needed and fresh perspective on policies that that have been kicking around for years,” said Gianaris. “It is to their credit that they’re driving the conversation on behalf of the next generation.”